Quake Live: open beta first impressions

This article from bigdownload.com offers some useful details if you haven't played the game yet, but this bit of info is probably this most useful at this point:

We knew that there would be a great deal of interest in playing a browser based free version of id's 1999 multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena, However it appears that id wasn't expecting the sheer number of users trying to sign in at one time. On Thursday morning we logged into the site and were put into a virtual queue of over 20,000 other players. We waited for over an hour before we were actually able to begin playing.

Of course the only solution to such an issue is ultimately time; time for the initial surge of players to die down to a more reasonable level and time for id to get more servers online. Indeed this morning we signed on and there was a queue line of "only" 5,000 or so players ahead of us. Our wait time was around 20 minutes or so. That's still way to [sic] long to sit around and do nothing but we think id will cut that wait time down even more once they get a handle on how much traffic to expect.